[ Placement Advice ] Probably.
Too long for a twitter thread. Too short to be a book. I still wanna let it out. Welcome to my void. ✨
There are not too many points in a person's college time where one gets the heebie-jeebies so bad that they feel - what is the right word here? It's a mix of fear? Pressure? Panic? I could go on, but you see my point. In a nutshell, it's cluelessness and a huge question mark hanging in front of them, asking, "Are you even remotely prepared for this crap?". This feeling hit me on July 8th 2020, when our class placement coordinator sent a text to our group that said, "Placements will start soon. Prepare your resumes."
Now I'll admit, I was definitely not unprepared to hear those words but I don't think I was too eager to hear them either. Flashback to Abhishek from June 2020. COVID had come along and turned him into a relaxed little couch potato, who didn't look at the mirror often. Clearly, the objects he feared were closer than they appeared and also he'd put on a few extra pounds.
[ Accurate representation of the situation if this were Minecraft ]
This is a weird spot to be in. Well, I skimmed through, with what I think was a halfass map and here I am, putting together a few pieces of the same which I really hope are right (and more importantly, right for you).
Alright. I'm guessing you came to read this for actual advice, and you see me blabbering like one of those recipe blogs that go over their entire life stories, so I'm taking the more responsible route of cutting to the chase cue road runner music.
How are placements gonna be? Short answer - messy, and honestly a bit tough on you. Long answer - Well, it depends, and that's why it's the long answer. In fact, I encourage you to read this, especially if the short answer didn't appeal to you.
The process
So there are on-campus and off-campus calls. I'd be focusing on the on-campus ones in this essay. It starts with a spreadsheet shared by the CGPU. You might've heard that they look like this.
[ You're lying if you say you haven't heard this ]
More often than not, that number is like 6 or 7, so don't be too harsh on yourself if you didn't maintain a great GPA. You should be fine for the most part. There is something you MUST be careful about though. It can deny you better placements even though you were eligible for them. Slabs. They're used to put you into brackets of salaries.
[ Note: This was the split for my batch. Yours might be different. Confirm with your placement coordinator ]
Anything above 15 was classified as dream/super dream and they didn't provide a distinction since only few recruiters came with higher packages that year. Point is, if you get placed at a 6 LPA company, then you lose any chance of interviewing for an 8 LPA company because of the slab (Exactly which slab the packages of 5, 8 and 12 LPA fall in were not mentioned. Confirming with your CGPU coordinator would be a good idea).
There is one more type of company. It's called a core company. The speciality is, if you get picked by a core company, your only next option is a dream company. Everything else is blocked out.
Be extremely careful when applying for these kinds of companies. Be sure you want to be there if you're applying. There's also a concept of Day 1 companies, where you can appear for all interviews and choose in the end. They all offer similar packages (and are supposed to recruit on the first day the college starts recruiting, hence the name) but generally actually recruit across a few months, but getting placed in one of these didn't bar us from sitting for the other Day 1 companies. Eg: Capgemini, L&T etc.
How do you plan better? Well, having an idea of which companies to target could be a first. Now I don't have access to CGPU data but I do certainly have the emails they sent me. I've aggregated them into a timeline when which company came. You can take a look there and have at least a start for planning it out.
Right. Now you have an overview of the process. Now let's check on the prerequisites. For pretty much every recruitment call you're applying, you'd fill out a sheet like this, and soon after you'd be asked to send in your resumes. This again is something a lot of you are likely to be worried about.
[ Yeah this is kind of what it is for campus placements ]
The Resume
I want to keep this brief so I'll throw in a few ideas for your resume.
For the most part, the resume is the document that helps get you an interview and it isn't entirely what you are selected based on. As long as it looks professional, you're gonna be fine here. (For off-campus placements, this is the exact reason why a super-strong resume is mandatory since yours has to stand apart from the 100k others).
I like to follow this format called the careercup resume, which neatly puts out everything a recruiter may wanna see in the most elegant yet compact way possible. (Feel free to experiment as well. I did add a few of my own touches to mine). This template was made by recruiters who hire for Google, Amazon and the like.
In a nutshell, make sure you list out the following (In my opinion, in this same order)
Education (Since we're freshers)
Work experience / Internships - especially if its at nice places
Tools / Technologies - I'd suggest sticking to what you're good at, and what you have used
Projects - Especially hosted ones. Clicking a link and seeing something real is a huge plus.
Here's how you can host simple ones.
Leadership / Volunteering / Achievements
Certifications (Relevant ones ONLY)
There's like a more generic but detailed guide available for the same. Feel free to check it out here.
The Aptitude Round
Remember your JEE days? Yeah, this is that but easier. Generally, aptitude tests have all your mental ability questions, and a few reading comprehensions (Pro tip: keep these for last. This basically saps away too much of your time) coupled with sections on your core field of engineering or maybe a few code snippets and questions based on them. Think of these as a strainer. The whole point is to make a first-level assessment of who are potentially good. Scoring decently will generally carry you across. No need to be a 10 pointer here.
To the best of my knowledge, as long as you can do "quick maffs", and match patterns and know basic stuff related to your branch, you should be fine here.
[ Yeah, this happens mostly in your imagination ]
I'd be lying if I said I complete most of my aptitude tests in time. That's intended. It's a feature, not a bug. Think of how you'd construct a test to rank people. The more the scope for everyone getting different scores, the easier for you.
Alright. Gotta wrap up somewhere. I’ll detail the rest of my “gyaan” in the second part of this post.